Here's how Victorian mansions became the standard for haunted houses
Aux Features The Haunting Of Hill House
When asked to describe a spooky haunted house, the homes belonging to the Cryptkeeper, the Munsters, and the Addams Family, Vincent Price’s house from The House On Haunted Hill (1959), or more recently, the mansion from Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting Of Hill House come to mind. But how did these once lavish homes become the dilapidated haunts of your nightmares?
According to a new video essay by Vox producer Coleman Lowndes, this phenomena can be broken down two ways. The first reason for the Victorian home aesthetic evolving into a playground for terror was that, after World War I and the Great Depression, American society wanted to move on to a more modern and innovative style. Not to mention that these heavily ornate Victorian homes were built to emulate the architecture of medieval Europe, and show off the owner’s vast wealth. Showing off one’s immense fortune while large swaths of Americans were living in dire financial straits didn’t bode well with most people of the period, with even The Washington Post calling the Victorian aesthetic “grotesque.” The abandoned home began to represent death, and a remnant of a much more gaudy time in our history.
As Victorian homes were abandoned in favor of modernity, these homes were no longer being taken care of and slowly fell into disrepair. Cobwebs formed, dust piled up, and the floors rotted and decayed. With all of these dark elements now in place, the second reason becomes quite clear: Nothing is more intense and frightening than walking through a dark hallway in silence when the floor creaks or a flimsy door slams shut. That inspired early horror auteurs like William Castle, Alfred Hitchcock, and Hammer Film Productions—just to name a few—as well as cartoonist Charles Addams, to blow off the dust and clear out the cobwebs from the halls of these mansions and breathe new, spine-tingling life into them.
Even if you haven’t seen a single William Castle film or read a single one of Charles Addams’ comic strips, you have almost certainly seen a film or a TV show or read a novel that was inspired by one or more of the aforementioned creators. They made the Victorian home what it is: The hallmark of haunted-house movies for decades, eliciting a fear response in your brain every time you see that castle-like house—usually on a hill.
22 Comments
Yeah, it’s kinda hard to imagine a mid-century modern split level being quite as spooky.
“And here is where Hank dropped the nacho dip onto the white carpet during the third quarter of the Super Bowl. If you listen closely, you can still hear his wife’s scream.”
Unless it was built on a graveyard that had just the Tombstones removed:It has a nice pool though.
Colonial works though. Amityville house was colonial.
Any sort of architecture where the house looks like it has a face works.
Dutch colonial, specifically. I’ll never have a house with eyeballs like that.
Haunted old plantation homes (some but not all of them Victorian) I guess is a subset of this? I am partial to the old mansion from the Thriller episode “Pigeons from Hell”
Haunted plantations? Sounds implausible. What tragedies have ever taken place there?
That’s almost too much of a lay-up.
Ehhh. It’s not like the drafty, Gothic castle/Victorian-style home wasn’t a symbol of the horror genre before the Great Depression.
House on Haunted Hill is a Frank Lloyd Wright house in the exterior shots, though the interior tends to the Victorian. I guess they figure people wouldn’t notice.
Any setting can be horrific, as can any architecture. Fear comes from the juxtaposition of the macabre with the every day. When Victorian mansions first appeared in horror, they were neither old nor unusual.
The ones that remained inhabited were likewise spooky, because it suggests a once-wealthy family that now has no means to live anywhere other than in the decaying estate. And those people are going to be a weird combination of reclusive, entitled and desperate.
Nice to see they ignored the whole classic Gothics to Sensation Fiction to Gothic Romances aspect to this.I mean who wants to watch an informational video about a topic that completely sidelined the whole history of the topic in question. Anne Radcliffe, Wilkie Collins, and Daphne du Maurier, are fundamental pieces in the chain that lead to this.
I live in the historic district with the largest collection of Victorian-era buildings in the country, and it made for one hell of a Halloween. The effect is somewhat lost when there’s a bunch of them close together and half are converted into apartments, though.
That does sound like a really cool way to spend Halloween! I can imagine that if there are too many Victorian homes in a row together it dulls some of the uniqueness to the experience, but it seems like that didn’t keep you from having a good time which is very awesome!
In Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None”/ “Ten Little Indians” the house the victims have been invited to was described as a modern, 30’s era house, but in the BBC production shown on PBS recently it is of a much older design – Georgian/Regency perhaps? All kinds of grand rooms, staircases, pantries, creating one of the creepiest non-supernatural thrillers I have seen.
That is interesting how they changed the home’s appearance for the BBC production. That style really did permeate throughout pop culture. I like a good bit of Agatha Christie’s work, so I hope I can watch it somehow. I’m happy you enjoyed the program.
Makes sense to me. The one I lived in was definitely haunted. A friend’s uncle was remodeling one, and ran out of cash part way through, so he rented it out to his nephew and a few of his friends (me included). I had the attic rooms. A sweet setup where I had two rooms to myself (a bedroom and a sitting room) divided by the staircase. The house still had the original gaslight pipes running through the walls, now visible due to torn down sheet rock in many of the rooms. Whatever was up there used to fuck with my alarm clocks. They wouldn’t go off, would go off randomly, reset themselves, etc. I tried different clocks, different outlets, even a windup, but I’d consistently find I’d wake up late because the alarm clock hadn’t gone off. The rooms felt real creepy too; unwelcoming and the air just felt thick. My roommates would get pissed because when I was not at home the alarm clock would go off at odd times and they would freak out at having to climb the stairs to my rooms to shut it off. I used to feel someone sit on the end of my bed when I was sleeping. The last straw was one day as I was watching TV, a lamp lifted off a table, floated through the air about 4 feet, then smashed on the floor right in front of me. I was so freaked I yelled out “I didn’t see that!” and went back to watching TV, trying hard to deny what had just happened.
Thank you for sharing your experience. So sorry that this happened to you. I imagine if the walls of houses from any era could talk they would have some very interesting things to say.
I think this ignores the agency of the Victorians – they essentially built these things to be scary – they weren’t that removed from the aesthetic romantic movement, which sought, to a certain extent, the haunted and the desolate.
You can find horror and terror in almost any environment, given the right script and camera angles, but Victorian Gothic architecture is practically inviting them in.
They knew what they were doing – one of my gripes with post-modernism is that it seems to constantly treat our ancestors as a group of numb-skulls.
Everything gains spookiness potential once it reaches a certain age and level of disrepair. Pretty soon we’ll be hearing Tales of the Haunted High Ranch….though really, I think those older houses better lend themselves to being scary because their layouts have so many rooms and nooks and crannies. I’ve got an older house that the previous owners turned open-concept by knocking down all the walls on the main floor. It isn’t scary at all… there’s nowhere for the ghosts to hide and the exit’s always a couple feet away.